Michael Hiltzik: Obscenely rich dialysis firms are spending millions to defeat California's tighter regulations

A good rule of thumb for assessing the value of a business is to look at how much its owners will spend to defend it from regulations. By that measure, the dialysis business is very valuable indeed.

We can determine that from the money the two leading companies in the field are spending to defeat Proposition 29 in next month's election.

The companies are Denver-based DaVita and the German firm Fresenius Medical Care, which together own about 75% of the 650 licensed dialysis clinics in California.

They have contributed about $80 million of the $86 million raised thus far to oppose Proposition 29; a third, much smaller firm, U.S. Renal Care, contributed almost all the rest.

That's on top of the $96.6 million the two top firms spent to defeat Proposition 23 in 2020 and the $102.6 million they spent to defeat Proposition 8 in 2018.

Those measures were very similar to Prop. 29; all three were placed on the ballot by the Service Employees International Union, which has been trying to unionize